Short Abstract:

This roundtable engages Iván Chaar López’s The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (2024) and its theorization of borders as technopolitical regimes in the administration of exceptions, and the hegemony of routines of information capture, processing, storage, and communication.

Long Abstract:

Calls to “secure our borders” and imaginaries of the migrant-as-threat represent the unbearable endurance of enmity in nation state formations. Such calls inform the deployment of distinct sociotechnical arrangements that, despite attempting to turn borders into technical artifacts, are the embodiment of political goals. This roundtable engages Iván Chaar López’s The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (2024) and its theorization of borders as technopolitical regimes in the administration of exceptions. Respondents draw on their commitments to science and technology studies, critical race theory, feminist studies, and media studies to tackle the book’s arguments about the hegemony of enforcement routines of information capture, processing, storage, and communication. To grapple with how border technopolitical regimes redraw boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, STS approaches require the transformation of methodological boundaries that take stock of differential treatments and asymmetry. Kalindi Vora’s work on surrogacy, technoliberalism, and robotics (Life Support, 2018; and Surrogate Humanity with Neda Atanasoski, 2019) expands themes of race, gender, and imperial formations. Philipp Seuferling draws on his work on media materialities, border making, and history (“Migration and the Deep Time of Media Infrastructures” with Koen Leurs, 2021) to elaborate themes on temporality, memory, and information infrastructures. Lilly Irani’s work on human-computer interaction, surveillance, and labor (Chasing Innovation, 2019; and Redacted with Jesse Marx, 2021) underlines the politics of algorithmic routines, state documents, and state formation.